


Dendrochronological Sampling in Werewolf Genealogy

by Guede



Series: Sustainable Management [6]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Hale Family, Alphahood Doesn't Come With A Manual, Alternate Universe - No Hale Fire, Alternate Universe - Werewolves Are Known, Angst and Humor, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Secrets, Human Alpha Stiles Stilinski, Incest, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Multi, Murder Mystery, Neither Do Nemetons, Pack Dynamics, Polyamory, Pseudo-History, Sheriff Stilinski is a Good Parent, Werewolf Biology, Werewolf Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2015-10-25
Packaged: 2018-04-28 02:59:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5075158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The tree inadvertently lands Stiles with a Hale family mystery.  Because God, plants are dense about stuff like cold cases.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dendrochronological Sampling in Werewolf Genealogy

When Stiles asks the tree to make a little more room, it burps up a werewolf skeleton.

He and his dad stare at the bones for a couple minutes. It’s a pretty intact skeleton, right down to the knucklebones, and the tree did them the favor of pushing up the bones in the position that the body had been lying, making it obvious that it’d been a deliberate burial and not just an accident. A couple scraps of flesh are still clinging here and there, along with a mat of hair under the skull—though that’s all gone red, so it won’t be much of a help with identification—but either the body was buried naked or it’s been under so long the clothes have rotted off, because there aren’t any fabric remnants.

“Um,” Stiles says. “I just asked it to help out with the hole, I swear.”

“Well, who is this?” his dad says.

The tree says it doesn’t know.

Stiles pushes the heels of his hands into his face. “Oh, my God, how can you not know? What kind of Nemeton are you?”

Thankfully, plants don’t do very well with sarcasm, so all the tree picks up is that Stiles isn’t happy with that answer. It elaborates a little, in that it pushes a bunch of impressions at him and gives him a massive headache for the next five minutes.

When the painkillers finally kick in, Stiles finds out he’s taken to sitting on the ground. Also, his dad has gotten rid of the stupid NSA special package and is now shifting the bones onto a tarp from the truck. “You okay?” he asks, frowning at a femur.

“Uh, yeah, just…ugh, trees don’t do well with cyclical-to-linear translations of passage of time,” Stiles mutters. He rubs some sap snot off his upper lip and looks at the buttons his father is picking out of the dirt. They shine a little under the dirt, maybe mother of pearl. “Okay, so, it happened maybe around the turn of the century? It was two guardians ago, anyway. The guardian knew about it, told the tree it was all good and made the hole and a bunch of blurry people—I’m guessing they had masking amulets—dropped the body in. Then they left and the guardian told the tree to forget about it, so the tree did.”

His dad gets some evidence bags out of his coat and drops in the buttons. He sets them aside on the tarp and then gets down to peer at something. “Huh,” he says. He holds it up, and then picks up something else. “Look at that.”

Two werewolf claws, clearly from different individuals. One’s a lot larger and longer than the other. Stiles crawls over and finds enough claws to guess that the smaller one is the odd one out.

“Found it in the chest cavity,” his dad says, wiggling the smaller one.

“I don’t think it’s an omega,” Stiles says. Something about the skull catches his eye and he lifts it off the tarp, rotating it till he’s looking straight down a clear bullet hole.

His dad, getting with it, stretches over the dirt and sifts around with his fingers till he’s collected some metal bits. “Hollow bullet. Why don’t you think it was an omega?”

“Because, um…” Stiles frowns and re-sorts the tree’s impressions in his head “…oh, yeah, because—”

He turns the skull around so it’s facing his father, then draws a couple runes on the brow. The bone creaks and groans under his hands—he really should’ve checked age first, damn it, his dad’s going to be pissed if it just goes to powder—and then _shifts_ , and the shifted form is way, way too large and elongated to be anything but an alpha. Then it shifts back and Stiles breathes a huge sigh of relief, seeing that it’s holding together.

And then he thinks about the fact that this is an alpha, with a bullet in its head and another werewolf’s claws in its chest, and that’s…not so much of a relief.

“Huh,” his dad says. He looks back at the different claws in his palm. “Damn. We’d better call Alpha Hale.”

* * *

Well, obviously, Stiles is going to wrestle that call from his father. Not that he’s a creepy asshole. Or that he’s any better at figuring out a tactful way to break the news, but he’s the fellow alpha and if anybody’s going to freak out about it, they’d better be taking it to him first. His dad’s got enough of a pain getting the morgue to open up—only in suburbia would death insist on normal business hours—and fudging things so the investigation won’t also end up revealing the NSA’s dirty laundry.

So Stiles calls the Hale house and gets Peter. “Hey, so, don’t freak out but we found a werewolf body in the preserve and it’s an alpha and it’s probably a hundred years old,” Stiles says.

Peter’s quiet for a second. _“How old?”_

“A hundred, give or take. We haven’t really looked at it yet but that’s what I can figure from what the tree says,” Stiles says. Then he chokes, because he needed about a second more air than he actually had to finish that sentence.

 _“Please remember to breathe,”_ Peter says, half-dry, half-concerned. He calls out to somebody, who sounds like Cora, and asks them to go to the kitchen and get Talia. _“Well, it’s probably an omega but someone will—”_

“No, it’s an alpha, I checked.” Stiles sees his dad come into the morgue and gestures to the phone. His dad holds up some forms on a clipboard and Stiles flaps him off. “It also got a real burial and the guardian at the time was in on it. So, uh, I think Talia better come down.”

 _“A hundred years old?”_ Peter says again. He sounds confused. _“An alpha? But who—all right, hang on, we’ll be over. You’re at the hospital morgue?”_

“Uh, yeah, still gotta jump through some hoops even though they’re too old for a criminal case,” Stiles says, half-distracted by his phone. Melissa’s texting him to ask what’s up with his dad, why is the morgue open at this hour. “Oh, shit, I didn’t mean—um, just come here and don’t freak out?”

The line’s dead. Stiles swears, gets halfway through calling Peter back, and then just gives up and goes to warn his dad there’s incoming.

* * *

His dad’s hung up with some deputy who apparently thinks a bitchy coroner is a reason to poke his nose in. It takes a couple minutes and Melissa to chase him back to the lobby, and by then the back way is swarming with Hales. Derek shows up first, then Peter and Talia, and last Laura, who is supposed to be back at college cranking out those thesis chapters.

“Food poisoning scare in the dorm cafeteria, I came back to load up,” Laura says, breezing by.

“You live off-campus,” Stiles says. He worms away from Derek’s standard full-body scent greeting and chases after her.

Laura shrugs. “So? Doesn’t mean I eat there.”

“At some point one of you is going to have to learn how to cook,” Talia says. She doesn’t seem too upset, although she’s not lingering to exchange pseudo-flirtatious quips with Stiles’ dad.

Derek slides up next to Stiles, which also helpfully blocks the morgue so Stiles can key in the security code before somebody breaks the door again. He mock-growls at his sister when she glares at him. “Peter cooks.”

“Peter thinks he has a broader skill set than becoming the pack chef,” Peter says. He puts his hand on Stiles’ shoulder and then dips for a quick scent when Stiles pushes open the door. “And I’m certainly not obligated to feed some other alpha.”

“You suck, uncle,” Laura mutters, shoving past them.

Talia sighs and snags her effortlessly back by one arm. “Manners, dear,” she says, with a nod to Stiles.

“So, anyway.” Sometimes the Hales are almost _too_ much like each other, but Stiles is going to ignore Peter and Talia’s shared drawl and just hand around a box of latex gloves. “We need to catalog stuff so please don’t take anything, put things back where they were, and remember that latex only works if it’s not punched full of holes.”

Derek declines the box, and when Stiles looks at him, he rolls his eyes and sticks his hands in his pockets. “I don’t want to touch,” he says. “I just came because Peter said it was an alpha and you were worried somebody had killed it.”

Stiles pushes his shoulder into Derek as he puts the box aside, then hooks his arm through Derek’s bent one. “Well, not really worried, whatever happened was a hundred years ago and I know there are cases of vendettas lasting longer than that but I feel like we would’ve noticed _something_ before now, and speaking of, we don’t have a case like that, right? Right?”

Peter and Talia are standing over the table where the bones are laid out with weird looks on their faces. They still don’t look mad or afraid or any other red flag, but they look…weird. Laura bounced over too, seemed to lose interest when she realized it really was just bones, but now she’s staring between the two of them like she isn’t sure whether she should back up or not.

“Well, it’s definitely great-grandmother Isabella,” Talia finally says. She reaches out and taps one of the buttons they’d found: very distinctive mother-of-pearl, carved into wolfsbane flowers. “Looks just like that portrait.”

Peter picks up a claw. He turns it around to look at the blunt end, then frowns. Then he picks up two more claws and peers into their ends. “Someone’s plugged these up.”

“I…thought great-grandmother died of distemper,” Derek says.

Talia and Peter look at each other. Then Peter shrugs. “Well, that’s what we were all told.”

“And I thought she was buried in the back with everyone else,” Laura adds slowly. “She’s got a headstone.”

“Actually, she has her name chiseled onto great-grandfather’s tombstone,” Talia says. “You know, come to think of it, that is odd. She was alpha, it should’ve been the other way around.”

Peter crooks his finger like he’s going to pop a claw and then notices Stiles hissing at him. He uncrooks his finger and starts looking around, then grabs an evidence bag and a needle-thingy from the tool tray. He holds the claw over the bag and tries to scrape whatever’s in the claws from there into the bag, but gives up after a few seconds. “I think this might be some kind of cement,” he mutters, sniffing. Then his nostrils flare and he abruptly drops the claw to hold his nose. “Damn. They mixed in wolfsbane.”

He steps back from the table and strips off his gloves to blow his nose out over a trashcan. Talia watches for a couple seconds, then turns back and reaches for the skull.

“Oh, Alpha Hale.” Stiles’ father steps into the room. He apologizes for the delay, pauses so Stiles can fill him in on recent developments, and then crosses the room to pick up a box sitting at the head of the table. “So we only just started looking, but there’s a bullet hole in the skull and we found some bullet fragments, probably a hollowpoint, and we also found another werewolf’s claw in the chest cavity. Some of the bones have deep scratches in them. Not that I’m the expert, but—”

The moment he mentioned scratches on the bones, both Laura and Derek moved in for a closer look. Laura’s checking out one of the femurs. “This one broke and didn’t heal all the way,” she says.

Derek’s found the tubes of soil cores they took from around the place. He starts uncapping and recapping them, till he sneezes and wheels away. “Wolfsbane,” he coughs.

“Did you find any rope, or any sort of symbol?” Talia asks.

“No, but a hundred years ago, a lot of things aren’t going to survive that long,” Stiles’ dad says. He puts his box down and recaps the soil core tubes. Then he rests his hands around the rack and looks at Talia. “If you’re thinking it’s murder, well, I should point out that I don’t think you’re going to find an exception in the statute of limitations to cover it.”

“You said the guardian knew about it, Stiles?” Peter says, coming back over.

“Uh, yeah. And the tree didn’t seem to think he was upset or anything.” Stiles grabs some tissues and hands them to Derek, then stays by him with his hand on Derek’s back. He thinks about pushing them to where he can reach Peter, too, but Peter still looks pretty calm, and not because he’s in coldblooded plotting mode.

If anything, Peter looks plain confused by the whole thing. “Well, that would’ve been Meri,” he mutters to Talia. “Grandmother loved her so it couldn’t have been bad for the pack.”

“Did she ever say anything about great-grandmother to you?” Talia says.

Peter shakes his head. Then he cocks his head. He reaches out for the smaller claw; they bagged it so it would be harder to lose. Both Stiles and his dad open their mouths as Peter picks up the bag and he waves dismissively at them.

“I’m not taking it out,” he says. He holds the bag up so both he and Talia can peer at it.

“It’s…small,” Laura says. “Was it a kid?”

“No, this was a packborn,” Peter says, twisting the claw in the bag. He points out the underside. “See the root? Clearly not retractable.”

“Oh, so you can’t just…stick a finger in and read the memory?” Stiles says.

Talia shakes her head. “No, unfortunately not. Although if it’s a packborn and at that time period…it has to be Clara, don’t you think?”

“Clara?” Derek and Laura say.

“Lost her right index finger,” Peter explains.

“So you know what’s going on?” Stiles’ father says hopefully.

Peter and Talia look up at him, then at each other. Talia grimaces and rubs at her temple, while Peter sighs and shakes his head. “Well, we were always told that Clara lost that finger in a kitchen accident and then left town because she married a Seattle businessman,” Peter says.

Stiles’ dad makes a face. “Sounds like a no. All right, well, if you’re sure this is your relative, you can claim the body. It’s too old for bringing criminal charges but standard procedure is to still do an autopsy and open a file. If you object, well, I can stall things for a couple days while you get—”

“Oh, no, I think we’d actually be very happy to have more information here,” Talia says. She gives the bones on the table another look, then steps back and crosses her arms over her chest. Laura and Derek are still giving her funny looks, but she ignores them. “In the meantime—if they went so far as to not bury her with the rest of the family, they must have had a reason for it. I’m inclined to not question it till we have some idea of what that reason is. Peter?”

He’s still fiddling around with the packborn claw. “Hmm? Oh…right. No, I agree. At least till we go through the logs.”

“Logs?” Stiles says, perking up. “Research? Can I help?”

Talia blinks, then grins broadly. “Of course, Stiles,” she says. “The more hands, the better.”

* * *

Werewolf logs, as it turns out, consist of reams and reams of musty, moldy sheet music, which have to be carefully peeled apart with gloved hands and tweezers and then have to be sung out by another werewolf in order to figure out what the notes actually translate into. Which does seem like the natural progression for a secretive culture with a strong oral communication tradition, but it’s taking forever.

“We keep meaning to digitize these, but it’s usually just weekly prey statistics and things of that nature, so…” Peter shrugs, coughs hard and then drinks deep from his pot of lemon honey tea. They’ve only been at this for a couple hours and he and Derek already sound like they’ve stuffed their throats full of gravel. “They wrote down magical developments in actual diaries, and I always found those more interesting.”

“Well, I’m sure if I dug around I could find a Library of Congress grant or something for scanning this stuff, but that’d take a couple weeks and also I’m not sure where the software is on reproducing werewolf howls,” Stiles says. He picks up a sheet and carefully breathes through his mouth, waving off the cloud of mold spores puffing up from it. “Not that I’m a music guy, but are these all standard notations?”

Derek crunches through three cough drops at once, then wipes his mouth. “Nope. Every pack’s got its own, there’s software for reading it but I’d have to spend a couple days rewriting it for ours. Honestly, it probably is faster going through it this way.”

He shakes out a few more drops and sticks them into his mouth, then gargles with some water. It doesn’t exactly look comfortable, but hey, it’s his throat.

“Okay, well, food for thought later,” Stiles says, handing the sheet over to Peter.

They spend the whole day at it, but they finally isolate the logs for the month of great-grandmother Isabella Hale’s death. It’s suspiciously skinny and Peter looks about as irritated as Stiles feels that werewolves can’t just translate off the written music—something about not being able to notate stuff like inflections and just going by context and instinct—but they go through it, note by note, and get a lot of information about what the turn-of-the-century Hales thought about adequate winter larders but not much else. There _is_ a mention of a distemper outbreak, for whatever that’s worth with a bashed-up skeleton and bullet remnants.

Derek buries his head in Stiles’ side, making pitiful little raspy whimpers, while Peter throws a handful of sheets back into their box and then flops over the rest of the couch, cuddling his mostly-empty teapot. Stiles sighs and swallows down his suggestion that they go through the log a second time, just in case somebody read something wrong, and just checks his texts.

Laura’s been spared the drudgery because she has to go back to school, but also because she volunteered to look into the university’s archives, too. From time to time, various werewolves in the region have donated materials to the university library, so it’s got a little bit of a specialty in local werewolf history.

Of course, Stiles could research it in the government databases, but unless he wants to spend days setting it up, checking into a dead Hale alpha will send up all sorts of flags to people who don’t need to be sticking their heads into this. And same goes for calling up other established packs in the area. Still, Stiles was planning a weekend trip up to the university (he likes Laura, but her being two and a half years into her masters thesis doesn’t give him confidence in her research-fu), but lo and behold, she’s sent around an email with some results.

“Hey, so Laura says Clara _did_ move to Seattle,” Stiles says. Then he sighs. “Okay, but she doesn’t have anything more than that. Apparently, somebody lost Clara’s furniture too, and she’s on record with a nasty letter complaining about it, but that’s it.”

“I don’t even know who Clara is,” Derek mumbles. “Nobody ever mentioned we had a packborn in that generation.”

Three-quarters of the way through he basically loses his voice and just powers through by virtue of various grunts that, give him credit, are unusually expressive. He finishes up with a prolonged fit of hoarse gagging that has him groping blindly for the cough drops. Which Stiles is withholding, not because of sadistic impulses but because one, Derek’s just going to chomp them again and that’s not how they work, and two, Derek’s chomping means the entire room reeks of eucalyptus, which kind of stings the eyes in high doses.

Peter is a little reluctant to give up the teapot, but eventually Stiles gets it away from him. He sits up and watches Stiles eke out enough warm water to make some of the drops gummy, in hopes that when Derek chews at them, they’ll stick to the top of his mouth and he’ll be forced to suck.

“You couldn’t talk about packborns openly back then,” Peter tells Derek. “Even if you supported them. Border wars, remember?”

“What?” Stiles says.

“What?” Derek grates out. His face contorts, since apparently werewolf healing has just as much trouble with repetitive motion injuries as modern medicine, and then he tries to tuck his head under Stiles’ arm, away from Peter’s disappointed look. “Shut up, you _know_ I did bad at history.”

Peter rolls his eyes and then twists around so he can wrap one hand around the back of Derek’s neck and the other on Derek’s arm, and drag him back down the couch. Derek whines and fights a little, but he stops when Stiles shoves the mug at his face.

“Clearly that wasn’t due to a lack of effort,” Peter mutters. He pushes Derek forward again, ignoring Derek’s protesting grunt, and then lays on top of him to get at the bag of cough drops on Stiles’ lap. “We’ve all got to be polite about it now, but when packs were first staking out the territories here, a good half of them didn’t follow the usual rules of war. Packborns and non-were affiliates had a fatality rate close to double the rate for weres in packs.”

“I read about that, but most people seem to blame it on starvation and exposure. You know, if you killed a were, you were as good as killing all the non-were dependents,” Stiles says.

Peter snorts and nudges Stiles’ arm with his head, then folds his own arms so they keep Derek’s head smushed between Stiles and the back of the couch. “Did you really buy that?”

“Well, I remember thinking the numbers were still kind of high, but I _do_ realize I’ve got a skewed perspective, you know. Not everybody’s as badass as Melissa.” Stiles shifts over and lets Derek lift his head, then smacks at Peter’s neck when Peter gives him the you-let-my-toy-go face. It might be comfortable for Peter but having a werewolf wheezing into your back itches like hell. “And I correlated with hunter stats and yeah, the Argents were around, but other than that it looked like most of the experienced guys were getting corralled into the army’s fight with the Native Americans. So, not a lot of reason for the rogue weres to be subtle about what they were doing.”

“But Clara had claws,” Derek says. He twists and turns, and when he realizes Peter isn’t going to get off him, he wriggles around till he can blow right in Peter’s face.

Even from where Stiles is at, the eucalyptus makes his eyes water; Peter jerks back his head and slits his eyes, then turns to rub his face against the couch. At the same time, his hand shoots down to plaster across Derek’s stomach, pinning him in place. Derek gasps, bucks up, and then nearly spits out the mashed cough drops, making this weird rattling noise.

Then Stiles figures out he’s giggling and he rolls his eyes and grabs Peter’s neck, tugging till Peter lets up on Derek. “No tickle fight when it’s going to squish your alpha,” Stiles says. “Also, yeah, claws. That a common variation?”

“Claws but nothing else sometimes comes up in our family,” Peter says after a second, because he always has to try and see if he can puppy-eye Stiles into giving way. “I assume that was the case for Clara and she wasn’t a partial shifter, since otherwise she’d be in the family chart. Partial shifters were always recorded same as full weres.”

Derek blinks. “She’s not?”

“No, she is, and you _would_ remember that if you had put any effort into your history lessons.” Peter adjusts himself so he’s only lying half-on Derek, with his feet stretched out to rest on the coffee table. “But she was written in later, I’m guessing by my grandmother, because you can see the ink is a different color. Still, there were photos of her in the albums. You can see that she’s missing a finger—Talia asked about it once, when we were children, and now that I’m thinking about it, Aman—grandmother did cut off that conversation fairly quickly.”

“If she could leave a claw in Isabella’s chest and then make it out of town, she didn’t need a shift to stand up against other werewolves,” Derek says thoughtfully.

“Okay, okay, so I’m wrong and the books lie,” Stiles says.

“Well, no, not entirely.” Peter leans his head back against the couch and looks distant for a moment. “They can’t hunt as well, so they will starve when a full were would be able to live off the land. On the other hand, in that time, if they didn’t take the bite, they usually ended up as magic practitioners. So killing them first was how you took down the fortress walls, so to speak. I’m not surprised that a lot of the deaths went down as for a different cause, but I wouldn’t put a lot of trust into those records.”

Derek looks at Peter, shifting uneasily into Stiles. He will get that way sometimes around Peter. It’s not really that he’s afraid of his uncle, more that…he’s worried he’s seeing signs of something, maybe a flashback. As casual as he is about violence, he’s really more of a defender and Stiles knows Talia and Peter kept the kids back during the manhunt for Kate and Gerard. He also knows enough now to realize that the public record on that manhunt is more than a little spotty, but he’s been reluctant to dig much into it. Partly because he doesn’t want to poke at old wounds, partly because Kate was sick in the head but Gerard was downright deranged, and Stiles doesn’t need more nightmare fodder, thank you.

Anyway, definitely time to drag Peter’s head back to earth. “Do you think Clara was mixed up in that? Border wars?” he says.

Peter blinks hard. Then he shrugs. “Possibly, but if that was the case, I really don’t think we would have let her leave town. And I don’t see why Isabella would be the one buried in the woods.”

“You know, speaking of, you think there’s anybody actually buried where Isabella is supposed to be?” Stiles says.

“I talked with Talia about that,” Peter says, wrinkling his nose. “She’s still thinking it over, but we should rule out whether this is some horrible prank. Yes, I know, and I don’t believe the tree was lying, but Meri and the others all might have been fooled for some reason. You can’t say at this point.”

“That sounds a little farfetched,” Derek says. He’s relaxed enough to grumble when Peter sneaks more of the cough drops. “Fool a whole pack and a guardian?”

Peter shrugs. “Well, technically, it _has_ fooled a pack already.”

Derek opens his mouth, then shuts it and looks sour. “Not what I meant.”

“Ugh, stop talking, both of you. It’s making my throat hurt just listening to you,” Stiles says. He pushes Derek off, running his hand over Derek’s hair when he makes a protesting noise, and then picks up the teapot and the mugs. “Don’t dig up any bodies while I’m getting water, okay?”

* * *

While Stiles is brewing more tea, it occurs to him that they don’t have to actually move soil to see what’s under it. He texts Lydia, who absolutely has a little project in her wheelhouse that they can try out, and then he goes to convince the Hales.

Of course Derek wants to see the tech specs. He goes over them while they’re eating dinner, then texts (because Peter finally tells him to shut up and give the healing a chance to work) the family that they look plausible, and at the very least, they’re not going to damage any of the grave markers. At that point, Stiles, Peter and Talia adjoin to the library to talk it over.

Well, Peter and Talia talk it over. “Grandmother must have put something there,” Peter says. “They weren’t complete recluses, they’d have to keep up appearances to the rest of the town. So they had to have had a dummy funeral.”

“All right, assume they did. Then what does that gain us if we check and find a weighted coffin?” Talia says. She crosses her legs and then folds her hands over one knee, leaning towards Peter. “She was too smart to have left clues to whatever this is in the dummy.”

Peter has his hand raised like he’s going to argue the point anyway, even though it’s clear on his face that he knows it’s lost. Then he lowers it and exhales irritably. “You know, what I don’t understand is why she’d even bother with a cover-up. If Isabella lost a dominance fight—”

“To a packborn claw and a gun?” Talia says. “You don’t think that would’ve raised hell back then?”

“Was anyone going to believe Clara?” Peter shoots back. “Grandmother could have claimed it and no one would have questioned her. It would have been easier, and we know she would have done it without a second’s thought.”

Talia tilts her head. “Clara just left town. Left town, not a word from her again, still don’t get a peep out of their descendants. Why wouldn’t Amanda just kill her?”

Peter clasps his hands, propping his elbows up on his knees, and rubs his chin against them. “We’re assuming Clara crossed Amanda. What if Clara and Amanda were on the same side?”

“Then why would Clara leave?” Talia says.

“She didn’t leave right away,” Peter immediately says. “She was here long enough for those photos of her without her finger to be taken. Again, if they weren’t worried about people seeing that, then why a cover-up?”

“Stability. Not letting the other packs see any internal divisions. You keep everybody close when you’re in trouble.” Talia rakes some hair out of her face, then looks hard at Peter. “What do you think looking in the grave’s going to give us?”

“I think it’d say something about what kind of person Amanda really was, even if it’s just a pile of rocks,” Peter says. “How you bury something says as much as what you’re burying, sometimes more.”

Talia hums thoughtfully. She pushes herself forward, then scoots the chair till she and Peter are knee and knee.

“You really think we need to know?” she says, more quietly. “They’re all dead.”

“They’re still part of our blood, and I’d rather know what’s running in it than not. You know that.” Peter looks up at her, then unfolds his hands and straightens up. “Pretending we’re something that we’re not never got us anything but trouble.”

“I defer to your expertise in the area.” Talia relaxes back and smiles serenely when Peter looks sharply at her. “Very well, Stiles, when can your friend come over?”

The whole thing, from start to finish, takes about five minutes, and sitting in the middle of it feels more than a little like sitting in the middle of an active firing range. So yeah, Stiles excuses himself to check with Lydia and scoots the hell out of there.

He promptly smushes himself into Derek’s chest, because Derek is waiting right outside. Derek grabs him and whisks him off—Stiles glimpses a blur up the staircase that’s probably Cora—and then pins him up against the hallway wall.

“Is Mom okay?” he says.

“I have no idea, but she’s weirding me out,” Stiles says. He wiggles his arm up and grabs Derek by the back of his neck, and when Derek’s grip loosens, he pulls them into the nearest room, because soundproofing runes and not getting _caught_ lurking, Derek. “Also, hey, your voice is back.”

Derek shrugs. “I got tired of sucking drops and just clawed myself. What do you mean, she’s weirding you out? Was she asking about your dad again?”

“No, thank God,” Stiles says, and then he gets his phone out and texts Lydia. Might as well do what he’s actually supposed to be doing. “She and Peter just got—really intense in there. I don’t know, you guys always discuss your family’s motives or lack of for killing each other?”

Derek is quiet. Not that he’s a rambler or anything, but he does respond to questions if Stiles is the one asking them.

When Stiles looks up, Derek has this tight, blank expression in his face, and he’s got his shoulders pulled back like he’s trying to make himself look smaller. It’s…Peter and sometimes Laura will mention how Derek shut himself off after his father’s death, but Stiles usually has a hard time seeing it in the grumpy, sarcastic asshole (all meant fondly) that is Derek today. Even after the piasa’s fire trauma, Derek had been moving around and grunting and glowering, but right now he’s just standing there and it’s creeping Stiles out.

He snaps out of it when Stiles reaches towards him. “Mom and Peter,” he starts, and then he pauses to step up and press into Stiles’ side. “Their parents died really young. They had to do a lot of dominance battles early on—some people think that screwed Peter up, involving him too young, not that they’ll say it to his face. When they could afford to, Mom backed them off it because she really wanted me and Laura and Cora to not have to do that.”

“But they still do those,” Stiles says. “Didn’t you say werewolf mediation’s basically an excuse to whip ass?”

“That’s not what I’m talking about, that’s the small stuff,” Derek says, making a face. “I mean—Peter could’ve made alpha a couple times by now. That kind.”

Lydia, surprisingly, is not immediately texting back. Stiles puts his phone away and looks over at Derek. “You know, I kind of wondered about that. I mean, sure, he has a ton of fun being the snaky second-in-command, but. Peter.”

“Laura asked him once,” Derek says after a moment. “He said if he and Talia had been both alphas back then, the other packs would’ve just used that to mess with the rest of the family and scatter everybody. And later, when he had time to think about it, he decided he didn’t want to have to build up a whole pack from scratch. Something about an alpha without a pack is just an omega with cooler eyes.”

“Well, okay, lazy and preferring the peanut gallery, I can see,” Stiles says, rolling his eyes.

Derek’s mouth quirks, but he shakes his head. “He _says_ that, but I think—Laura and I think Peter got torn up or taken or something like that in one of those fights, and Mom got him back. She always gets nervous when she hasn’t heard from him in a couple days. And she must have done something really nasty, because half the time he’s doing the dirty work because he thinks he’ll be less likely to lose it. If he was alpha himself, he couldn’t do that, he’d have to challenge her to stop her.”

Stiles starts to comment, but just then his phone chimes. It’s Lydia, saying she’d be more than happy to help out. And then about ten more texts, demanding more measurements and details about what they’ll be scanning. He snorts and puts his phone back, then moves his head as Derek nuzzles in. “Okay. He did sound like he was playing devil’s advocate in there. I don’t think they’re really that worried, you know, but it’s a little hard to tell. They went kind of…”

“Like they’re talking about strangers?” Derek says. He leans their heads together. “Yeah. They do that sometimes, when they’re figuring out a threat. They did that a lot when—after Kate and Gerard escaped. It drove Laura nuts, and she used to yell that she couldn’t tell the difference between Mom and a serial killer.”

“Wow,” Stiles says. “Um. How did Ta—your mom take that?”

“She would just ignore it. I think she and Laura talked later, but…” Derek sighs “…Mom’s usually good about keeping us in the loop, but when she starts acting like that, it means she’s thinking of cutting us out. Peter’s not as bad, but he’ll still do first and tell later.”

“Well, we’ve decided to dig up your great-grandmother’s grave,” Stiles says. “Look, I don’t know what the deal is here, but if I find out something, I’ll tell you and Peter.”

Derek presses his mouth into the side of Stiles’ jaw, then pulls back and runs his hand through his hair. “You know, I get they can’t always talk about everything. But I hate that I don’t even know if I can help or not. I think that’s what bugs Laura too. Mom and Peter just bounce back to acting like they don’t have anybody but them, but they’ve got _us_ now.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling.” Stiles hooks his arm around Derek’s shoulders and leans up to kiss him by the mouth, then nips at the side of Derek’s throat on the way back. “But hey, let’s not freak out before we have to. For all we know, we’re going to dig up nothing. Or a weird time capsule explaining how all of this is some giant practical joke on us modern people. Or nothing. Anyway, let’s just see.”

* * *

So the next day, Lydia and Stiles sweep over Isabella’s plot in the official Hale cemetery with Lydia’s experimental ground sonar equipment, and it turns out that one, there is an actual coffin, and two, it’s not empty. Three, it’s got a skeleton in it.

At that point, everybody wants to get that coffin up and see what the hell. Derek and Peter and Francis strip off their shirts, while Talia calls Laura, and Stiles and Lydia do their best to be not embarrassingly obvious with the chest appreciation. It’s a good thing Jackson’s stuck back with Scott at some co-captain briefing session with Finstock.

They get the coffin lid up very carefully and then Peter kicks the other two out, because the lid’s about the only part of the coffin that’s holding together and even it’s more like a rotten venetian blind, and starts checking out the contents. He throws up some Victorianish jewelry, which Lydia wipes off and then dates with the help of an antiquing app, and a small stiletto dagger, which Talia seems just as excited about as Lydia.

“This is from the old country,” Talia explains, balancing the dagger between her hands. “It’s got a thread of real silver folded into the blade, you see? For defense, in case ghouls came to dig up your corpse.”

“It says here that they were difficult to make, and blacksmiths in America never took up the tradition so it’s incredibly rare to find one in here,” Lydia says, looking at her phone. “It was too expensive to import them.”

Talia nods. “They were reserved for alphas only.”

“Speaking of,” Peter grunts. His head pops over the top of the grave and then he throws up his arm and levers himself out. He holds out his fist and opens it. “Found her claws.”

Stiles takes one look at them and then he gets out his phone and scrolls till he finds the photo he took in the morgue. Lydia immediately crowds his shoulder, but there’s nobody on his other shoulder so he looks up. Derek’s staring at the claws, along with all the other Hales, and from the expressions on their faces, Stiles doesn’t have to state the obvious.

“Are these from the same person?” Lydia says, frowning at Stiles’ phone. “Where did you find the one in this photo?”

“All right,” Talia says. All the excitement’s gone and she sounds like she’s talking to herself, like people do when they’re walking somewhere alone and they’re creeped-out. Her arms come up and she looks at her hands like she isn’t quite sure what to do with them, then slowly wraps her arms around herself. Then she unwraps them.

She goes over to the edge of the grave and Francis starts to get up. Talia lets out a curt snapping sound, a little shorter than a bark, so he stops, looks a little lost himself, and then trades looks with Peter.

“I’m going to make some coffee,” he finally says. “Stiles, Lydia, would you like anything?”

Lydia, with her usual unerring sense of impending drama, offers to come with him and help. Stiles declines, not because he can’t feel the tension or because he’s super-eager to poke at it, but because what he _can_ offer here is the ability to ferret out information, and he can’t do that from inside the house. So he goes and looks into the grave too.

It looks pretty normal. Well, actually, it looks a lot plainer than the graves he’s usually dealing with, since it’s so old everything is the same color and texture down there. Even the bones are kind of black-brown and he’s having a hard time telling them from the—wow, he’s an idiot. Stiles slaps his forehead, then squats down and rubs his hand against the side of the hole till he finds a root.

“What are you doing?” Talia asks him.

She sounds—nervous. He looks up at her and she waves her hand at him like she thinks he’s hesitating because he’s scared of her. Which maybe isn’t too far from the truth. Sure, he’s seen her concerned before, but he’s never seen her shaken like this. He almost wants to tell them all to go inside and then do like the tree and forget all about this.

“I’m asking the tree if it can tell when this burial happened,” Stiles says instead, because yeah, they’re kind of looking right at the object lesson. Burying things just means they surface later. “It’s close enough to the preserve, the root system’s, um, it’s…God, it’s cranky, shut up, you’re hibernating, not dead and…sorry, anyway, this one definitely went down after the other one. Trees are kind of shitty with calendar years, but I think it’s saying it happened much later. Like years later.”

Talia nods tightly, then goes back to staring into the hole. She twitches when Peter finally comes up next to her, but doesn’t turn around.

“I can’t believe she didn’t tell us about this,” she mutters. “I’m _alpha_ , damn it.”

“She did that about a lot of things,” Peter says.

Talia whirls on Peter, suddenly enough for him to take a step back. Stiles jumps to his feet and is reaching for the tree when Talia just stalks past Peter and on into the house. Peter watches her go, a tight, tense expression on his face, and then turns to Derek, who’d leaped up with Stiles.

“I’d let her,” he says. He pauses, absently rubbing at the dirt on his pants, and then sinks into a crouch by Stiles, looking into the grave. He keeps jiggling Clara’s claws in his hand.

Derek looks back and forth between his retreating mother and his uncle, then runs both hands through his hair. Which smears dirt all over his face and he looks irritated when he realizes that. He glares at his hand, then throws it up and turns towards Peter.

“Okay, what the hell?” he says. “Mom’s not talking, so you need to.”

Peter glances back, then blinks hard as Derek drops next to him. He starts to reply but Stiles reaches over and slings his arm over Peter’s neck. The corners of Peter’s mouth twitch back in an almost-smile and he leans into Stiles, but then his eyes stray back to the grave. He grimaces and reaches behind him for his shirt. Knots up Clara’s claws in it and then sets it aside and goes back to staring into the grave.

“It’s not like we knew any of them,” Derek adds after a moment. He sounds about as irritated as he does uncertain. “It was so long ago, is it really a big deal?”

“I don’t know,” Peter says slowly. He drags his hands through the grass to clean them off, then starts grinding the dirt off his forearm with the heel of one hand. “Well. No. Obviously, if there’s some confusion about who was the actual alpha, that’s an issue.”

Derek frowns. “But that was a hundred years ago. If somebody was going to challenge us—”

“No one’s going to challenge. Clara came back here to be buried, she wouldn’t have done that if she meant to rip apart the pack, and they wouldn’t have buried her here if they thought she would.” Then Peter gives himself a sharp shake and sits all the way down, pulling up his knees so his feet aren’t dangling into the grave. He presses hard into Stiles, but reaches out to scuff a soil streak off Derek’s jaw. “Your mother and I didn’t get along very well with Grandm—with Amanda. You know she raised us for a while after our parents died.”

“She died before Laura was born,” Derek mutters to Stiles. He bats off Peter’s hand, which is going for the dirt on his shoulder, and then shrugs. “Yeah, I know Mom thought she was too strict.”

Peter makes a face. “It wasn’t that. Amanda wanted us to be different from her generation—she was a smart woman, and she rightly saw that times were changing. But her idea of doing that was to not tell us a damn thing about what had happened before, and let us blunder around with the other packs. She nearly got us killed in pointless fights with them.”

“School of really tough love, huh,” Stiles says. “I hear you.”

Now Derek’s eyeing him funny. “I thought your dad was okay.”

“I—what? Because he is! I’m not talking about him, God, I mean, yeah, he kind of had to teach me the ways of killing, but it’s not like there’s an age of consent for that.” Stiles only doesn’t flop back in disgust because he’s still holding onto Peter. He does glare at Derek, and keeps it going even after Derek’s gone from wincing straight into big, sad, sorry wolf eyes. “No, I meant…my mom’s family is kind of. Well. Nutty. When Dad was dating her, he had to go and train with them for a year in Poland, and they did all kinds of bullshit to him. She was so mad she stopped talking to them for a while, and honestly, we still sort of avoid them.”

Peter nuzzles into the side of Stiles’ face and Stiles half-heartedly allows it, even though one, he doesn’t really need the comforting (old grudges are kind of like old flannel in that they’re both easy to slip into), and two, _he’s_ supposed to be doing that. Although he guesses if it’s comforting to Peter to be comforting Stiles, then…somewhere in that cyclical mess he’s done his job as alpha.

“Anyway, Talia’s upset because she and I worked very, very hard to clear up everything Amanda refused to tell us, and we thought we’d gotten it all,” Peter says. He stops nuzzling Stiles and looks at the grave again. “You know, honestly, I really thought we had. Suppose that’s a reminder.”

“That family always manages to screw with you?” Stiles says. “That it’s not your fault who you’re born to?”

Peter glances over at him. “Stiles, I understand that you’re trying to make me feel better, and while I appreciate it—”

“You sound bitter,” Derek says.

“I’m not. Really.” Stiles pulls his arm back and starts playing with the little curls at Peter’s hairline, which always gets Peter going. Except that Peter might purr and curve into it, but his eyes are definitely still alert and curious. “Ugh, no, I’m not…okay, I’m a little bitter. Look, I…realize I’m kind of a huge hypocrite for making you share and not returning the favor, but I don’t really want to get into the huge mess that’s Mom’s side right now. Let’s just say, it’s nice that you guys will still bury each other, even if it’s switcheroo day or whatever.”

“You remember that werewolves declare vendettas with each other at burial sites, don’t you?” Peter says dryly.

Stiles bumps the jerk with a shoulder, because yeah, but some poetic license for trying to stretch his limited sympathetic skills here. Of course Peter just grins and pushes his head up against Stiles’ throat. He’s getting dirt on Stiles. Not too bad at first, but he’s starting to worm his hands around over Stiles’ hip and back. And Derek’s apparently reassured enough about Peter to slide behind him and start using Stiles as a pillow.

“I know this looks an awful lot like our first time, but I’m not having sex next to your dead ancestors,” Stiles finally says. He elbows both of them. “Seriously. Come on.”

“Well, Talia should be calmer now, and if she is, she’ll want to discuss this,” Peter says, with just a trace of regret. He looks a little more somber when he gets up and sees his shirt, still knotted around Clara’s claws, but he scoops that up with just a slight pause.

Derek glances at it, then at Peter. “You really think we’re good.”

“I can be wrong, obviously.” Peter purses his lips, obviously not liking how snappish that was. His fingers twist roughly in the shirt. “I—tried _damn_ hard to fill in all those holes. I hate being wrong.”

“Yeah, but come on,” Stiles says. “I know you’re good, but nobody was going to see Nemeton version of a hairball coming.” 

“Besides, if something comes up, we’ll take care of it,” Derek says, shrugging. Even without the look at Stiles (who is already cupping his hand over Peter’s nape, even for somebody as shitty as he is at comforting, that’s just low-hanging fruit), the high set of his shoulders would give away that he’s faking the breeziness.

But the slight tilt of Peter’s mouth says he appreciates the act, and the way he slows to match pace with them gives away that it’s not just for the amusement factor. He dusts some dirt off Derek’s back, then shrugs and looks up at the house.

“I suppose we should do more research before we make another move,” Peter says. “Stiles? Would your father mind terribly if we sent another set of bones to be analyzed?”

* * *

“Honestly, I think they were relieved,” Stiles’ dad says a couple days later, handing over the reports. “You haven’t sent them anything off-the-record in so long they were afraid you were saving up a bad one.”

“Nobody appreciates a little preemptive sampling,” Stiles mutters. “Also, they’re a forensics lab, getting drippy boxes in the mail is _in the job description_.”

His father holds up his hand, pauses, and then just shakes his head and turns away. He plops down behind his desk to start in on his overflowing inbox while Stiles takes the reports over to the couch. The autopsy on Isabella’s pretty lengthy, detailing a number of possible pre-death wounds besides the bullet to the head, the chest wound and the leg break, but it doesn’t turn up any new clues on what she was doing out in the preserve.

Clara’s autopsy is a lot shorter. She definitely died a human. She also only outlived Isabella by about ten years or so. Likely cause of death isn’t clear, but her skeleton’s got a number of healed injuries that say she took a serious beat-down around the time of Isabella’s death, and a couple of them would’ve been giving her trouble up till she kicked it. The report notes that complications from the spinal injuries alone could’ve eventually killed her. And then Stiles turns the page to the magical pathology part and there’s the kicker.

“Isabella and Clara Hale were _fraternal twins_?” he yelps.

“What?” his father says.

“Oh,” Chris says.

Stiles looks up. Chris is standing in the doorway, holding an evidence bag with some kind of dead bird in it, and is halfway through taking off his coat. Stiles’ dad is standing up behind his desk and, judging from what he’s doing with his hands, he’d been in the middle of inviting Chris to step in.

“…bad time, I can come back,” Chris says, backing out of the room.

Stiles jumps over the couch arm and skids after Chris. “Wait, wait, no, you don’t, you didn’t look surprised at all, you come right back here and you _tell me what you kn—_ ack, Dad!”

His father drags him back into the office, sighing, and then sticks an arm in the way to keep Stiles there. “He’s not rabid, I swear,” he says to Chris.

Who’d done a pretty impressive backwards standing hop to the corner, but who warily comes back up the hall. He stops well short of Stiles’ flailing arm and carefully hands Stiles’ dad the evidence bag without letting his coat swing near enough for a grab either. “I came across it on the southwestern corner, it smells like somebody’s setting out poisoned meat for the buzzards.”

Stiles’ dad makes a face. “Goddamn it. I hate these.”

“Yeah,” Chris says. He leans back and his eyes drop to Stiles, who will damn well climb his father if he has to. For a moment he’s definitely contemplating a quick exit, but then he sighs and shrugs his coat the rest of the way off. “Is something wrong?”

“It’s not an emergency and damn it, Stiles, if I have sneaker treads on my back—” For all his whining, it’s not like it takes more than two seconds and a huff for Stiles’ dad to pry him off. He dumps Stiles back on the couch, then stands back and prods at his spine with a sour look. “The Hales are having a little family issue.”

“Your eye twitched!” Stiles says, jabbing his finger at Chris. He hooks his legs over the couch arm and then hikes himself back up to sitting. Then he notices he’s crumpling up the reports and he winces, then starts batting them against his knee to smooth them out. There’s movement at the corner of his eye and he whips his head back up in case Chris is doing a runner. “That’s your hiding shit because of manners eye twitch! You know something!”

Chris isn’t running. He is, however, looking at Stiles’ dad like he expects an explanation.

“I have no idea,” Stiles’ dad mutters. When Chris’ expression changes to dubious, Stiles’ dad makes a defensive gesture with his hand and then turns around to stick the dead bird on his desk, muttering something about raising the kid not making him a mind-reader.

“Well, if it’s the Hales’ business, I’m sure I’m not the right person to be hearing about it,” Chris finally says, looking back at Stiles.

“But you know—” Stiles starts.

His dad turns around and shoots him a look, and okay, yeah, Stiles’ mouth _is_ running a little ahead of certain other things that are also important, like diplomacy and empathy and just not inadvertently refiring people’s grudges. But damn it, if that wasn’t a flash of recognition in Chris’ face, then Stiles is just a psychopathic gardener.

“Okay. Okay, nobody wants to be uncomfortable or put in an awkward position, I get it, I respect it, _seriously_ , you can walk away if you want,” he says, holding his hands up. “But let’s say, hypothetically, that we’re looking into something where nobody’s quite sure what’s going on, because it happened a really, really long time ago. And not knowing includes whether or not this has any impact now, which is more of a general problem than a family-specific problem. Because again, nobody wants to be uncomfortable, but I don’t think anybody wants to deal with a submarine attack. You know?”

“Stiles,” his dad says sharply.

“I’m just saying, if _hypothetically_ , you think you might have relevant information, then I think we could just raise that fact and then see whether Talia wants to know,” Stiles says. “Because this theoretical thing we’re talking about really came out of the blue and there’s no way you would have known it would come up, so I don’t think anybody can rationally blame you for not mentioning you might know about it before. And _irrationally_ speaking, I get that people are dipshits but hey, I’m the one asking, I will totally admit and _own_ that I’m the instigator—”

“Stiles,” Chris says, looking pained. “If you’re—if you’re asking whether I mind you telling Talia I have some information about her family…are you asking that?”

“Well, in theory?” Stiles says. He ignores his father’s groan in the background. “Yeah.”

Chris presses his lips together. Something catches his eye and he glances past Stiles, then shakes his head and makes a dismissive gesture with his hand. Then he half-turns. He nudges the door shut with his elbow and then leans on the knob. “Honestly, they probably should have them anyway,” he finally mutters. He pauses, then looks up at Stiles. “Just—when you tell her, can you let her know I didn’t come across them till after Gerard was dead? I was cleaning out his house, and—I thought about sending them over then, but it didn’t…really seem appropriate. She’ll get it when she sees them.”

“Sure.” Stiles starts to ask, then stops.

“They’re letters,” Chris says dryly, reading him.

“Thanks, Chris,” Stiles’ dad says, coming up. He puts his hands on Stiles’ shoulders and starts to pull him back. His hands are squeezing kind of hard. “We realize you’re not obliged to—”

Chris snorts, then runs his hand over the side of his face. “It’s all right, I’m not offended,” he says. “It’s not going to be a surprise to anyone anyway. Everybody knows we were keeping tabs on each other.”

“What?” Stiles says, blinking. “Hey, wait, I didn’t think—crap, are they going to take it that way?”

When Chris looks surprised, an unexpectedly sharp twinge of guilt goes through Stiles. He knows a lot of people still lump Chris in with the rest of his family, and yeah, so he’s with Derek and Peter, but—well, he goes and eats dinner at the Argent house and only calculates the effect on his dad’s cholesterol levels when they’re on the way home. And he didn’t throw a fit about his dad letting Chris into the house wards, and he puts out an extra share of breakfast whenever he wakes up and sees Chris’ car in the drive, and, well, Stiles just figured the guy knew Stiles was okay with him.

“Like I said, it’s public knowledge,” Chris says, shrugging. “It’ll be a couple hours for me to get those out of storage, but I can probably find them in time for dinner.”

“That sounds good. Again, thanks.” Stiles’ dad lets go of Stiles long enough to walk Chris into the hall and then they chat for a couple seconds. Then Stiles’ dad comes back into the office.

“I really just wanted to get this cleared up,” Stiles says. “Just—they’re kind of freaked out, and it’s freaking me out to see Talia freaked out, and…I mean, I didn’t _know_ Chris would have random Hale letters in his attic.”

“It’s a hunter family, Stiles, of course they’re going to research the most prominent pack in the region.” Then Stiles’ dad sighs. He closes the door again and then looks at Stiles for a couple seconds.

He’s disappointed in Stiles. Hell, _Stiles_ is disappointed in Stiles. That’s the kind of thing he should think of right off the bat. It’s not even obscure or unexpected, it’s just plain community relations 101.

“I know you weren’t trying to be a jerk,” his dad finally says. He doesn’t sound as snappy as before and that just makes it worse. “Look, Stiles, I know you want to help out the Hales. And asking Chris isn’t a bad idea in general, given that his family’s been active around here almost as long as they have—I was thinking about how to do it myself.”

That…was not where Stiles thought the disappointment was going.

His dad rolls his eyes. “I _do_ do this for a living, kid. And yeah, we need to get this resolved so I can figure out how to write up finding Isabella Hale in the preserve. I was holding off till I found some time to feel out both sides. There’s no need to rush it, and you know, as worried as Talia might be, she might not want Chris to know that more than she wants to know what he knows. I just think we could’ve done this a little differently.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” Stiles drops down onto the couch. There’s a crack of papers and he realizes he’s still clutching the reports. He tosses them onto the coffee table and then puts his elbows up on his knees, rests his chin on his hands. Stares at the wrinkled sheets.

With a sigh, his dad sits down next to him and puts an arm over Stiles’ shoulders. At first Stiles pulls away from it, because he knows he fucked up and rewarding fuck-ups just isn’t right, but his dad is stubborn and just yanks him back. Stiles winces as his jaw bumps off his dad’s shoulder—a rock, his father, literally and metaphorically—and then gives up and sinks into him.

“You’re gonna screw up once in a while,” his dad says. “Investigations are hard. And they’re harder when people you care about are involved. I guess I should just be glad you didn’t screw up with somebody who’ll go after you.”

“I feel like you should be more mad at me than you are,” Stiles mutters. “Not that, you know, I don’t appreciate the lack of rage, Dad, but…I’m sorry. I’ll tell Chris I’m sorry, too. I even was thinking about what you said, you know, with not guilt-tripping him into helping ‘cause he’s got issues with that, and I was trying not to.”

His dad looks at him. “You kind of did anyway.”

“Yeah, I _know_.” Stiles shoves his face into his dad. “So why aren’t you yelling at me?”

“Well, for one, yelling at you’s never really worked before,” his dad says, shrugging. His hand comes up and rumples over the top of Stiles’ head, then drops to Stiles’ shoulder. “Two, you know you did wrong and you feel bad about it. I know you, I know you’re going to beat yourself up over it more than I ever would. I don’t like what you did just now, you make a habit out of it and I _will_ get mad, but I also realize dealing with these two families isn’t easy. Honestly, every time Chris comes over and Derek and Peter are around, I feel like I’m stepping over tripwires everywhere.”

Stiles lifts his head and frowns. “Really? You seem pretty cool about it.”

“Thanks.” His dad shrugs again. “I don’t want to make it worse than it is. None of that should be going on you, it’s not your problem, and Chris is a bundle of nerves half the time anyway.”

“ _He_ seems pretty cool about it. Well, I know, I’ve noticed the whole using rooms in shifts thing, but other than that, he doesn’t act like he’s going to run for the door,” Stiles says.

His father snorts. “Because he’d rather choke it down than be the one who splits up another family. Melissa and I are working on that, but it’s a good thing Peter’s decided to be tactful. Couple times with Talia I’ve come pretty close to—well, let’s just say, I understand how easy it is to stick your foot in it around these people.”

“Hey, no moral high ground over here, whatsoever. Moral swamp, I’m pretty sure,” Stiles says.

“You’re a good person, Stiles,” his dad tells him, giving him a firm squeeze on the shoulder. “You are. And that’s the main reason I don’t get that mad at you. You’re going to figure out what’s the right thing to do and then do it.”

Stiles isn’t so sure about that, but it makes him feel good, hearing that from his dad, and he’s never been great at being a martyr. He leans into the man and just thinks that he’ll have to work on it. He hates letting his father down.

“Anyway, Chris can make his own choices. He’s got some problems but being brainwashed isn’t one of them, and…I keep telling myself that treating him like he is doesn’t help anything,” Stiles’ dad adds. He looks frustrated at himself for a second, then shakes his head and looks at Stiles. “And the same with the Hales, you know. Being one of their alphas doesn’t mean you’re responsible for solving all of Talia’s problems.”

“Yeah, I _know_ , it’s just—Dad, we kind of started the whole thing,” Stiles mutters. “If I hadn’t asked the tree—”

“Maybe a flood would’ve washed out the bones, or Chris would’ve eventually handed over those letters. Anyway, you didn’t ask the tree to throw up a mystery, and you sure as hell didn’t ask the Hales to identify the body as one of them.” His dad shrugs. “Stiles, sometimes life is just weird.”

“Amen, Dad,” Stiles says after a moment. “Amen.”

His dad gives him a last squeeze, then gets up. “Really, it’s not too bad, nobody’s dead who wasn’t already dead,” he says. “Now, can we please just keep it that way?”

Stiles smiles, then throws his dad a mock-salute. His dad rolls his eyes and sighs, and stoops to scoop up the reports. He tosses them into Stiles’ lap and then goes back to his desk. Gives the dead bird a grumpy look and then starts filling out a pathology request while Stiles goes back to reading up on Hale skeletons, and they at least are good.

* * *

After some healthy debate, Stiles’ dad ends up giving Talia a call, then putting her on speaker so Stiles can chime in. As predicted, she’s not surprised in the least to hear that Chris has stuff about the Hales, although she _is_ silent for a couple seconds after Stiles passes on Chris’ side-note.

 _“That was sensible of him,”_ she finally says. She pauses. _“Please let him know that we will take whatever it is he has. And you can thank him for thinking to offer it to us. I realize he doesn’t have any reason to keep his father’s things now.”_

She also agrees with Stiles’ dad that Chris will drop off the letters with Stiles’ dad, and then Talia and Peter will come by the office the next day to pick them up, along with the coroner’s reports. Then she gets off the phone and Stiles and his dad do paperwork and then go to dinner at the Argent house, where Stiles dodges Allison (because he is _sorry_ , okay, but his dad covered the scolding pretty well already and he’s not that much of a masochist) and manages to apologize to Chris without throwing too many tangents in there.

Chris looks kind of blank for a second, like he still doesn’t see where any of this is coming from, but he recovers and is very nice and lowkey about accepting the apology. And repeats that he wasn’t offended anyway. Stiles is grateful, but he also makes a mental note to pay more attention when Allison drops hints about her dad’s trauma, because his dad is an awesome person and has Melissa’s help too, but it’s starting to look like one of those times when more buckets is always better.

Then they go finish dinner and Stiles helps Allison with some of her rune studies while their fathers pretend to wash the dishes, and when the Stilinskis walk out of there, Stiles’ dad has a slightly fuller workbag.

It kills Stiles, but he doesn’t look at the letters. Seriously, kills him, especially since Peter’s staying at the Hale house for the night and Derek has gone up to visit Laura (probably because Talia is apparently still stonewalling them and Peter is sympathetic but is dealing with his own shit). But he doesn’t. He does two weeks’ worth of homework and textbook readings, brushes up on werewolf genetics, edits some of his father’s reports, but he doesn’t go anywhere near the letters till he and his dad and Talia and Peter are sitting in his dad’s office.

His dad makes a token attempt to apologize for having to stick around—since the body came up in federal land and he needs a reason to either close the file or start a formal inquiry—which Talia dismisses with a smile and an offer of banana bread, and then they get down to reading the letters.

Turns out they’re love letters, between Clara Hale and a hunter. “That was very perceptive of Chris,” Talia says, her brows up. She shuffles through the stack, checking the dates on them. “I probably would have taken it as an insult if he’d sent them over earlier.”

Stiles’ dad straightens up sharply and Peter glances over, but Talia’s got her nose buried in a letter. Peter gives Stiles’ dad a look that’s half-caution, half-plea, and settles himself closer to his sister, though he keeps his hand on Stiles’ knee.

“I don’t think he was with any of the known families,” Peter says. “Although he’s made a couple references that make me think he spent time with the Coast Salish tribes.”

“He’s very diplomatic about this rift with Isabella, whatever Clara was referring to,” Talia says.

“He’s not that nice in this one,” Stiles says. The ink’s faded while the paper’s darkened so the two are almost the same color, and on top of that both of them have really spidery, super-loopy writing, so that half the letters look alike. He has to inch through it, word by word, instead of speed-reading like usual. “Wow, no, if Clara’s really quoting him right, he’s actually really—oh.”

Peter looks over Stiles’ shoulder, and Stiles can tell when he gets there because his hand abruptly jerks off Stiles’ knee, a second before his claws go out and he makes a fist of it. “Talia,” he says.

She looks up but she doesn’t make any move to take the letter. Stiles is apparently supposed to tell her, and he…thinks about making Peter do it, but then he sees how Peter is clenching his jaw. “It sounds like he came down and visited her at some point, and she got pregnant,” Stiles reluctantly says, pushing his leg against Peter. “Isabella was upset and wanted her to take the bite?”

Talia goes very still. Then she turns towards the letters scattered over the table like she’s a robot with rusty joints and picks out one. “Clara was the older twin,” she says, fingering the letter. “She wouldn’t inherit so long as she was packborn, but if she ever took the bite, she’d be a contender. She’s telling her lover in this letter that she never plans to, because she and Isabella had mixed their blood when they were children and it turned black.”

“It’s an old-fashioned way to tell if a bite will take or not, and black means it won’t,” Peter explains. He tilts his head towards Stiles but otherwise forgoes his usual cuddling, even though he’s obviously upset. “Not that accurate, as it turns out, but for a long time most werewolves believed in it.”

“Anyway, if you bite a pregnant woman, she’ll miscarry at the least, and the miscarriage might kill you before the bite can take, if you bleed out too fast,” Talia says. Her voice is very calm and very distant. She lets the letter slip out of her fingers, then looks at Stiles again. “What else does it say?”

Stiles bites his lip, then takes a deep breath and picks his way through the rest of the letter. He can hear his dad shifting around, but when Stiles looks over, his dad just gestures for him to keep on…whatever he’s doing. Peter and Talia wait for him without seeming to move a muscle and it’s eerie as hell, but he can’t think of a reason to stall.

“I think this was written a couple months after it all went down,” Stiles finally says. “Clara miscarried, all right, but she didn’t—she didn’t get bitten, and she’s telling him that…I think he was saying something about she might be better with her pack, since they sided with her, but she’s saying even that’s not enough, that she can’t stand to stay in town anymore. It hurts too much and she wants to join him in Seattle.”

He holds onto the letter for a second, but neither Peter nor Talia move to take it from him. So he puts it on the table, so they can get it if they want it.

A couple more seconds pass and then his dad gets up and goes over to the corner. He comes back with a pair of Styrofoam cups and a bottle of whiskey, which he uses to give each cup with a liberal shot. Peter stirs enough to look amused, but it’s brief, and he pulls out a little vial of wolfsbane tincture and doses the whiskey with curt movements. Then he picks up his cup but he doesn’t drink it.

“This is the last letter by date,” Stiles’ dad says, sitting back down. He pokes a sheet on the table. “Sounds like the guy was having trouble on a hunt. He’s writing Clara to say he’ll be on it longer than expected. I ran his name through the license database but nothing came up. Records are pretty spotty for that time, especially for western states.”

“Did Chris happen to mention how Gerard got hold of these?” Peter asks abruptly.

Stiles’ dad slowly shakes his head. “He has no idea. He says his best guess is the hunter might’ve been known to one of the Argents—they had an offshoot operating out of Yakima around that time—and if Clara left town suddenly, maybe the house got cleared out by fellow hunters. But that’s just his guess.”

“It wouldn’t have been that sudden,” Talia says. She points at the same letter Stiles’ dad had. “That’s dated only a few years after she left here. She didn’t come back to be buried for several more years, according to the coroner’s report.”

“She came back to die and they treated her like the real alpha,” Peter says thoughtfully. He reaches out and sifts through the letters till his hand is buried under them, then pulls it away and watches the sheets settle. “I wonder what she did.”

“We could put out a couple feelers,” Stiles’ dad says. He holds up a cautioning hand when Peter and Talia look at him. “But it’d mean opening a formal inquiry. I have to say, right now I don’t think there’s any real reason to, from the Service’s perspective. It looks like a private matter.”

Talia nods. “And of course, if it was an inquiry, it would be public.”

“You could petition to seal the records later, but it’d still be accessible to parts of the Service, and a few other agencies,” Stiles’ dad says.

Peter glances at Talia, but she’s taking her cup of whiskey from the table. She swirls it around in one hand, then lifts it and drinks it. She doesn’t just slam it down but she does finish it off in one go. Then she puts down the empty cup. She props her arms up on her legs and steeples her hands, resting the sides of the steeple against her brow for a second.

Then Talia puts her arms down and looks at Stiles’ dad. “Thank you,” she says. “You’ve been very generous with your time and resources, and I know both are very limited. I don’t think we’ll be imposing on you any further.”

She gets up. Looks at Peter, and when he doesn’t move, just purses her lips and then makes for the door. Stiles’ dad grimaces and hastily gets out of his seat so he can walk her out.

“You okay?” Stiles says to Peter.

“This is not remotely what I thought Chris might have,” Peter says after a second. He’s still holding his whiskey. He glances at it, then shrugs and takes a swig from it. Then he lowers his cup and looks at it again. “Your father has good taste.”

Stiles grins and then stretches over so he can hang himself over Peter’s back, letting his arms dangle down across Peter’s chest. Peter moves his head so Stiles can nose down behind his ear, one of his favorite spots, and then sighs and sets the cup down. Then he reaches up and takes Stiles’ hands in his own.

“Well, your father’s probably right in it being a closed matter,” Peter says. “Taken together, it sounds like the pack handled it, from start to finish. Talia will want to talk through it, but to be honest, I’m not sure we should be second-guessing their decision. Most of the major events happened here and if the pack didn’t record the details, we’ll never know them.”

“Yeah, and are you okay with that?” Stiles says. “You know, with not knowing?”

The side of Peter’s mouth twists up. Then he turns his head and rubs his cheek along Stiles’ jaw. “The part of me that’s been burned too many times by other people’s mistakes wants to keep digging,” he admits. “And the part of me who just likes to know. But we know they were sisters, we know they turned on each other, we know the pack took Clara’s side over Isabella’s, to the point that they gave Isabella’s place to Clara, but they still didn’t want their descendants to know it was really a packborn. And we know they weren’t good enough to help her when she needed it. I thought looking into this would tell me something new about the family, but the more we find, the more I think…it just tells me they weren’t us.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, petting Peter’s shoulder. “Yeah, well, nobody’s making you dig. And we can always come back later if it keeps bugging you. Nice thing about living in the future, you have time.”

Peter laughs quietly, then lays his head against Stiles’ for a moment. Then he shifts back and Stiles thinks Peter wants him to get off, only to get a werewolf plastering him to the couch. Stiles yelps and then hits Peter, hearing the chuckle, and then twists over so he’s at least on top of Peter as they go over sideways.

“It’s my dad’s _office_ ,” Stiles says.

Peter raises his brows. “Really, Stiles, I know you’re an adolescent male, but you need to control those urges of yours.”

Stiles…really wants to headbutt him. Really. Of course, the one time Stiles tried headbutting somebody he—well, he did break their nose but he also busted open his eyebrow on their teeth and that had been just gross to get cleaned up later. So he settles for just dropping his chin on Peter’s chest, hard. Peter grins and does the lamest fake wince over, while he’s slinging his arm around Stiles’ waist.

He does really just seem to want a cuddle, so Stiles leaves it at that. Or he’s going to, but his phone buzzes. “That’s probably Derek,” Stiles says, watching Peter’s face. “I promised I’d update him once we read the letters.”

“You mean him and Laura,” Peter says, and then cocks his head. “Yes?”

“You’re not going to freak out?” Stiles says.

Peter doesn’t get it, and then he does. He inhales a little sharply, then gives Stiles a tight smile. “No, I’m not.”

“Because he and Laura have been freaking out over you and Talia,” Stiles says. “So, not to be pushy here, but—”

“You’re going to push,” Peter says.

“Well, hey, he’s worried, and so I care. I get that this is a family thing and I’m…I know it’s all weird and I’m pack but I’m not Hale, but when you guys aren’t talking to each other I think I should be worried, too.” Stiles pushes himself up on one arm so he can see all of Peter’s face. “And I’m sorry it’s you, but like I said, I’m trying to respect all the crossed boundaries here, or, you know, at least the ones that aren’t Mobius stripping, and Talia’s not my beta.”

Peter laughs, for some reason. He reaches up and runs his hand up and down Stiles’ arm, then wraps it around Stiles’ wrist. “Thank God for that. You’re not responsible for dealing with her, Stiles, alphas can look after themselves.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think that rules out asking whether she’s okay,” Stiles says. “And—yeah, I’m asking. You’re pack so she’s pack.”

When Peter laughs this time, it’s quieter and strangely careful. “She’s fine,” he says after a short pause. “It’s not that we don’t trust Derek and Laura, or that we think they’re incapable, you know. But they’re the next generation. You need someone to keep the pack going.”

“Okay, but I also feel like it’s a bad idea to risk losing the people who know what’s going on, when a little help would avoid that whole problem,” Stiles says. “And…so that sounded a little less like it was deliberately digging up past history in my mind, because I do actually try not to be that kind of asshole. Even if that’s where I end up anyway.”

“But it’s a good point,” Peter says slowly. He puts his head back and pulls Stiles’ hand up till it’s resting on his collarbone. “This is why Talia likes you, you know. You bring in a new perspective, and you make us hear it.”

“Well, then, I guess I’ll just keep running my mouth.” Which Stiles says while trying to bury his burning face in Peter’s chest. He hears Peter chuckle again, and then feels the man’s hand petting his head.

Stiles’ phone buzzes, then keeps on buzzing. He pulls it out and it’s actually not Derek blowing up his phone, it’s Laura. Using Derek’s number, but Derek is heavy on the acronyms while Laura spells out everything but liberally peppers emoticons throughout. She also switches sets constantly and the current chibi Cthulhu ones make Stiles snort.

Peter has Stiles’ right hand so Stiles is awkwardly texting with his left when Peter just takes the phone, hits dial and then puts the phone to his ear while Stiles is still in mid-squawk.

“You are maxing out my alpha’s phone plan, Laura,” Peter says.

Stiles can’t make out all of Laura’s reply, but it mostly seems to be disbelieving. Fair enough, obviously Stiles’ dad isn’t going to go for a messaging cap.

“Calm down, your mother is fine.” Peter shifts so he can put his legs up on the couch arm. His brow wrinkles. “Of course not, Chris wouldn’t have letters about that, that happened twenty years after—did _either_ of you listen to a single history lesson, ever? Never mind, you’re going to get one now.”

Halfway through Peter’s summary, Stiles’ dad walks in. He crosses his arms over his chest and then glowers when Stiles tries to signal him to go back out. “This is an actual office I use for actual government business,” he says. 

Peter smiles and nods and levers himself and Stiles up off the couch without missing a beat in skewering Laura’s and Derek’s theories. He does pause to thank Stiles’ dad for putting all the letters back into the file, then takes the file and Stiles (who shrugs and waves bye to his eye-rolling father). So yeah, Stiles figures Peter’s okay.

* * *

The Hales decide to rebury the bones like they had before, except with Clara’s name added to the grave marker. Well, in that they are going to put Isabella back into the preserve. They can’t put her back exactly where the tree burped her up, because that spot’s taken again, but Talia tells Stiles that that’s not a problem so long as they’re in the same general area.

“Is there something about that spot?” Stiles can’t help asking. “It’s cursed or unblessed or is just the penalty area for alphas behaving badly?”

Talia’s been pretty much back to normal, and Derek had mentioned earlier that she’d sat down with her kids and actually talked through all the letters and the coroner’s reports with them, so Stiles isn’t watching his mouth around her. He kind of wishes he has when she goes still.

But then she shakes it off. “I was hoping you might have some insight, actually,” she says. “I can’t think of a reason, except that it’s near enough the Nemeton for the guardian to keep an eye on it, in case it was ever disturbed.”

“That’s pretty much all I’ve got.” If there’d been more clues, like amulets or something with runes on it, or even traces of herbs besides wolfsbane, then maybe Stiles would be able to say more. But he went back and checked the spot twice—much to the tree’s annoyance, because it still doesn’t understand what’s the deal, for the tree it was just another burial—and nothing. And tree guardians at the turn of the century didn’t keep records, annoyingly enough. So it’s just another question mark to add to the mountain of them.

Most of the family is off at the Hale cemetery, putting Clara back in the ground, with Peter presiding in Talia’s place. They didn’t have to do them at the same time but nobody seems to want to deal with Isabella longer than they have to. It’s rare to see a pack topple an alpha, but it happens, and Stiles knows that the romantic idea of that being an unforgiveable crime is all kinds of bullshit. Pack strength only works if you’re not killing each other, and no matter the time period, going after a pregnant lady looks pretty bad.

Anyway, so it’s him and Talia. His dad drove them out but then had to take off for a hiker call on the other side of the preserve; Derek supposedly is coming soon to walk them back to the Hale house, but last Stiles saw him, he was trying and horribly failing to help Cora braid burial ropes under Peter’s instruction, so Stiles is dubious about how fast that’ll happen.

“Well, okay, it’s good,” Stiles says, patting the resmoothed ground. He gives the tree an extra mental cuddle for its bitching about having to wake up so much, then gets to his feet.

He starts to take a step back, but Talia’s not following him. She’s still looking at the spot where Isabella’s bones now are. They aren’t going to mark it here, but Stiles’ dad is filing new maps with the spot set down in case somebody ever needs to come back.

Maybe Talia’s rethinking that or something. In which case, okay, and Stiles can give her a couple minutes, but as time drags on and she doesn’t move, he starts to wonder if he should suggest they take it back to the house. She’s probably not going to do anything crazy, but they are close to the tree and it _is_ technically a few days into hibernation season, when Nemetons are most vulnerable, and yeah, basically, Stiles doesn’t want to have to wait for her. It’s cold and he’s hungry and his sense of tact goes inversely to his level of physical discomfort.

“Sorry,” Talia abruptly says, lifting her head. She raises her hand to touch the side of her face, then turns and smiles ruefully at Stiles. “Lost my train of thought. And I’m keeping you, I’m sorry, and when you and your father have been more than accommodating.”

“Yeah, well,” Stiles says, and then hand-waves the rest because what is he supposed to say? Standard procedure for turning up an old family tragedy is to _not_ be dicks about it? “Um, are you okay?”

She smiles again, walking up till she’s next to him on the trail out. “I’m fine,” she says. Her hair whips across her face and she starts to tuck it back behind her ear, then pauses. Then she takes a deep breath. “I will be, I suppose. It’s…not unusual to have surprises sprung on you in this family, as I’m sure Peter has told you. I hope you don’t find it too off-putting.”

“I think if I didn’t like surprises, I wouldn’t be hooked up with an agency that regularly dumps bodies on us,” Stiles mutters. “Honestly, compared to some of what Dad and I have accidentally dug up, this wasn’t that bad. Well. Really honestly, compared to what _I’ve_ accidentally dug up.”

Talia laughs under her breath, but she sounds and looks distracted. They go a few paces without speaking and then she looks at Stiles again. “If no one’s come out and said, Stiles, you should know that the Hales haven’t had a peaceful succession in a few generations. When my grandmother—when Amanda died, that was probably the closest, but I wouldn’t call what happened immediately afterward that peaceful. Peter and I—and Richard, when he was alive—we were determined that it would be different.”

“Well, it looks pretty good now,” Stiles says. Mostly because she keeps looking at him like she’s expecting a response. “Right? I mean, Laura’s dragging out her thesis, but she can’t keep doing that forever.”

“And you’re here now.” She’s really intense about it and she seems to get how unsettling it is, because she flashes him another rueful smile. “I’m sorry, that’s a lot to put on you. I only meant…well, I’ve thought we were clear a few times, but we kept having close calls. Peter left, which I didn’t handle well, and then those renegade Argents.”

Talia glances away and down at the ground. Werewolf age gets hard to gauge after the mid-twenties or so; Stiles knows from public records that Talia has a good decade on his father, but usually she and Peter (who is more like September than December, and not like May would ever be Stiles’ month anyway, just because it’s all flowers doesn’t mean the botanical guy has to take it) look only a few years apart.

She looks closer to Stiles’ dad for a second. Just how tired she looks, and how obvious it is that she’s still got a ways to go. Then she shakes her head and she’s young again. “No matter how old you are,” she says, making Stiles hope he wasn’t mumbling about her looks. “You still never are really sure if you’re doing the right thing. I know you’re worried about your inexperience, Stiles, but let me assure you, alphas will feel that way up till they die.”

“That…is not actually reassuring,” Stiles says. Then he winces, but Talia just blinks and then nods, exactly like Peter conceding a point. “But I get the—I think I get the gist, and thanks. And—if it means anything, I’m never going to be a by-the-letter jackass and say it’s just Derek and Peter. Any of you need help, my dad and I will see what we can do.”

“I know, Stiles, and I appreciate it. And we will do the same for you,” Talia says quietly. She’s silent for a few more seconds. Then she inhales through her nose and her head lifts. Her mouth twitches, then curves into a pleasant yet faintly menacing smile. “And speaking of, there’s my son. I suppose I’d better go ahead, I know he hasn’t seen you in a couple days.”

A couple minutes later, Stiles finally gets hold of Derek’s hair and drags him off. Derek whines in protest, but even his werewolf ass senses that Stiles isn’t as into the make-out as usual.

“I’m sorry, okay, it’s just…God, your mom’s good at scaring off my libido,” Stiles says. He lets Derek stuff him under one arm and inside the leather coat, even though it’s actually a warmish day. “She gives me permission and I feel like I should be running for the hills.”

Derek rolls his eyes, but his fingers are curling up under the hem of Stiles’ shirt. “So she’s okay,” he says.

Stiles sighs and wraps his arm around Derek’s waist. “Yeah, I guess. I think we’re all back to the usual Hale homicidal charm, it’s just…I literally just helped her bury a relative, okay? I have your blood kin’s bone dust on my hands.”

“You want hand sanitizer?” Derek says.

“Oh, my _God_.” Stiles shoves his head into Derek’s shoulder, because just. Seriously. Derek is dead serious, and that is so him, and Stiles’ taste in men and ugh. What.

Also, what, so Stiles is also considering it. He’s weird and they know that and they’re just as bizarre. In the end, it works.

“Okay,” he mutters, and takes the little bottle Derek slips him. “But this is _not_ going to be a habit, Derek. It’s not. Stop looking—don’t look at me like that, damn it, do you want sex or do you want another lecture on the history of necrophilia?”

“Whatever,” Derek says, and finds them a convenient tree.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write something that would explain why the Hales are considered a very liberal pack in this 'verse without getting too info-dumpy. And a little of why they're very nice, very friendly werewolves who will still cut you, and why Peter and Talia have the relationship that they do. Also, I wrote a Thanksgiving-themed installment and then realized that it jumps ahead too far in terms of characterization, so I've been writing pieces to fill in the gaps ( _Habitat Corridors_ , _Cooperative Hunting_ and now this).
> 
> No matter what color it is, human hair turns red as it decays.
> 
> It's not a mistake that Stiles refers to the prior guardian as 'he' and Peter refers to Meri as female; I'm trying to get across that the tree has limited understanding of what it perceives (also, limited visual senses since plants don't come with eyes). So Stiles assumes it's a male based on incomplete info and Peter, who has better sources, knows the guardian at the time was a woman.
> 
> Isabella is named after Isabella of France, nicknamed the She-Wolf for her political maneuverings against her husband Edward II of England.
> 
> The idea of werewolf sheet music as a method of coded communication comes from the fact that recording your history in song was pretty common in pre-writing societies, including Scandinavians/Vikings, and in my head, the Hales are originally from the British Isles (frequently invaded by Vikings!), because Hale is about as English a name as you're going to get. And sheet music _was_ used to encode messages, although spies using it seems to be mostly a fictional thing; seems like otherwise it was just a fun way for composers to 'watermark' their compositions with their names and stuff like that.
> 
> The whole thing about the blood mixing is based on very early methods for blood typing (if you're not a complementary blood type, the antibodies make the blood clump).


End file.
